Adding cue-points allows you to spice up your flash videos created with FFMpeg. Adding metadata to a FLV will allow you to introduce cue-points that have their own metadata that can be display when the cue-point is reached or let you jump to that cue-point. In the following tutorial you will learn how to add metadata to your FLV files using flvtool2 and how it is useful for adding cue-points.Continue reading →

One of the hardest parts about doing video on the Internet in the past has been knowing what video format to use. With the rise of video sharing sites like youtube the answer these days seems to be Flash video. It is very easy to create Flash videos and display them using FFMpeg and a free player.

You can also create your own Flash player if you like either with the Flash studio tools or something like Ming. For simplicity I would recommend using FlowPlayer to start with since it works well, is completely free, and has a number of features that can integrate with meta data in the Flash video.

I've been trying out Ming SWF output library in PHP for a few days and I thought I would give the Ruby extension a try to see how well it worked. It turns out that it is kind of old and busted but it is fixable.Continue reading →

Not long ago I was curious about using Java to look up DNS information so I decided to put together a little DNSBL/RBL checker so I could experiment with Java DNS lookups and some PHP/Java communications. There isn't a lot of Java DNS stuff out there but it was easy to tell that the tool for this job is the DNSJava library.Continue reading →

For fun I recently pimped out a ruby script that I had written for some testing with a little color and a spinner. If you have never used ANSI escape codes before I've put together a simple script that shows how easy it is.

At work we have been using DNS Black Lists for a long time to deny spam coming into our email systems. There are a number of places you can check to see if you are on one of these lists but I figured I would write my own web 2.0 version. So here it is my own DNSBL checker. I believe it has most of the major lists on it but if I find more I'll add them. I'm also going to try to post more about how it is all put together.

For the longest time having POP3 messages stored in one large file bothered me. I found out however that you can easily convert the single file storage into Maildir style storage with fetchmail and procmail. Here are the steps I used to fetch mail from a POP3 mailbox and store the messages in Maildir style folders.

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About Me

I am Carson McDonald a software engineer and this blog is a small slice of what I do every day. I started developing software in 1989 and since then have work with a wide range of languages and systems.